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The White Media Kills Again and Again

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Recently, in a photo essay entitled, “Here's what life is like on the notorious Wind River Indian Reservation,” the online Business Insider gave a tour of the sprawling central Wyoming home of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes.

The essay delivered what it promised: a portrait of a place riddled with violence and addiction. A photograph of a trailer where a young girl was murdered was captioned: “The pictures are blurry, because when I raised the camera to take them, the school teacher who was showing me the reservation screamed that I was going to get us killed. She did not view this as an exaggeration. She seemed genuinely terrified.” Underneath the last photo — a gray raincloud descending on a sweeping plain — reporter-photographer Robert Johnson wrote an ominous caption: “Before I leave, I am told not to come back alone.”

Despite Johnson's previous job as a soldier, Indian country apparently shook him up a lot more than it did my 77-year-old Swedish mother, who not too long ago drove her navy-blue Volvo smack into the middle of the Wind River Indian Reservation, stopped at a gas station, and asked the first people she saw if they knew how to get to the home of an Arapaho man she wanted to find. Two Native women finished gassing up their car and led my mom the six miles to his house.

I'm not disputing the statistics on crime and addiction on the Wind River. They are undeniably bleak. What I am disputing is the tendency of the non-Native media to refuse to write about, or perhaps even look for, anything but the unbearable.

It might be news to many reporters (and their readers) but thousands of reservation residents spend their days neither drinking, nor drugging, nor murdering each other. I went up to the Wind River Indian Reservation on assignment for Smithsonian 11 years ago, and fell so deeply in love with the place and its people that I became a frequent visitor for the next 10 years. Mostly, I drove up alone. It wasn't a cakewalk being there. I saw some really scary things. A 17-year-old boy I knew was murdered; another was jailed after he beat up a police officer. But there was also my good friend Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho horse gentler so widely respected that a white sheriff's deputy from nearby Lander would bring his horse to the reservation to get his help. This deputy was so impressed by Stanford he wrote cowboy poetry about him. I often hung out at that corral and in the adjacent sweat lodge, and my primary feeling was one of delight.

Still, the media come to the reservation, eager for lurid stories but incurious about the people they see. A February 2012 front page New York Times story entitled “Brutal Crimes Grip an Indian Reservation,” reported: “The difficulties among Wind River's population of about 14,000 have become so daunting that many believe that the reservation ... is haunted by the ghosts of the innocent killed in an 1864 massacre.”

The article spurred 277 letters in two days. Some expressed historical outrage, while others blamed Native Americans for not lifting themselves out of their own mess. Some criticized the one-sidedness of the writing. Reservation teenager Willow Pingree, for example, wrote, “Not everything about this reservation is bad. … What many people who are not from this reservation ... don't understand is that there is a strong spiritual bond that we have with our culture and our homeland.” To its credit, the Times invited Pingree to write a longer letter in response to Williams's article.

But would it have been so hard to write a more textured, less biased story in the first place — one that tried to humanize the writer's sources? In 2010, I spoke to Wyoming Indian High School history teacher and cross-country coach Chico Her Many Horses, an Oglala Sioux who moved to the Wind River Reservation in 1990. He had seven sons, one of whom was in graduate school at Dartmouth, and his wife is also a teacher in the high school. “If we didn't think this place was good, I wouldn't be here, and my sons wouldn't be here.”

Non-Native reporters might think they're helping Native America by exposing the difficulties of Native life. But because so many people form an impression of reservation life from the media, it only makes the problems worse if reporters go to the reservation just to reinforce whatever ideas they arrived with. When reporters don't get curious, and fail to leaven their portrayal of reservation difficulties with a broader, more human picture, Native people end up being filed away in a special place in readers' brains — the file in which we put THINGS WE'D RATHER NOT THINK ABOUT. Which is where we've been putting Native Americans for five centuries.

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halito, lisa
im from wyoming and have been to wind river many times
i cant understand why white folks have such a hard time wrapping their tiny minds around what goes on amongst any peoples who deal with poverty, and alcoholism.
in amongst all the negatives there are always positives...people striving 24/7 to make things better and lift themselves out of the 'mess'...anyone who is constantly downgraded by a 'dominant' society has a hard time with self-image...why dont european americans try something new...stop manifest destiny and hold out a sincere hand toward helping people to better themselves...i think 'the earth shall weep' should be required reading in every high school in this country....maybe then minds could be wrapped around how native people really feel and think...

halito, lisa
if this actually gets published here, here is a little something to think about....
manifesto....
my heart lies on the ground
you came to my country and took from me
my languages, customs and beliefs
all i held dear and believed to be true
my relations fell under your diseases and genocides
on the assumption that by ridding yourselves of us
you would have free rein
to re invent and perpetuate your lifestyle
from sea to shining sea
for centuries you have labored under this delusion
but, we hid behind the facsimilies of the new life you imposed upon us
held onto all you tried to destroy in our secret selves
my heart holds the scars of 500 years of repression
but i go on...
(2013janiceleeweisstruitt/aiahnichih ohoyo)

Mainstream media is beating the drums of war and misinformation. Instead of helping people on a constant basis, it's a side line to gain sympathy. It should always be about "service". In Navajo, we become human beings, we are not born that way. Thank you for sharing.

Why do they focus on the bad? They make it sound like all "natives" are alcoholics & drug addicts. Well I didn't know that alcohol & drugs was just meant for indians! There are non natives that are alcoholics & drug addicts too! So to sit there & say that everyone from the reservation is an drunk or druggie!....I'm really getting tired of these articles being written like that! And by the way, I'm from the wind river reservation, I'm NOT an alcoholic nor a drug addict...nor a murderer & whatever else they say we are!!!

Speaking for myself -I find beaty in so many ways . I grew up othe res and a better person for it. I learned from MY family HOW TO APPRECIATE everything money can't buy. I personally think if you have not been taught THE NATIVE culture- THEN IT'S PROBOBLY NON OF YOUR TOURISTY BUISNESS. We have been forced to SHARE our lands. Mother earth has many children. I should not have to explain why I love WindRiver and the peoples living there . There is a PROPER etiquette that non natives don't get. OUR WAY ISN'T SOLD IN BOOKS AND NEWS ARTICLES . THAT IS WHY THEY can't buy us or snake tougue us into false trust. I still struggle daily with racism TO AND FROM ME. Past is past huh????? I'M STILL MAD . IPERSONALLY THINK NATIVES ARE. ME I ME . IDON' T HAVE A FAMILY TREE AND OBVIOUSLY NO TRUST . I f these people want to learn so badly the they need to look in their own actions. Even when UNINVITED he only understood the violent part. It didn't occur to mr.education news man he may be offendig anyone? just sayin.

It's dehumanizing for any group when an outsider comes in to observe, particularly for a very short time, forms rapid opinions and broadcasts them. The arrogance of "drive by" investigations into a culture like this Business Insider article, is never acceptable. How can a reporter actually believe they understand what is going on if they don't live there at least for a while and talk to many, many people? Furthermore it just isn't fair to focus on one aspect of a culture ignoring the multitude others that grow in it's circle.
Unfortunately it's up to us, the commoners, to speak up when this happens. So, let's keep it up, folk! Arrogance married to ignorance is not acceptable!!!

This is undeniable proof that the " the preverbial pen is mightier than the sword". Every attack upon in Reserved Treaty Rights, Native American communities and life must be responded to by Native Americans themselves. The media controls the publics image or stereotype by what it presents as freedom of speech. I have learned that their freedom of speech most often is as you state unrepresentative of the entire race, What the media syllogizes as an inability of Native Americans to contemporarily adapt to existing within the dominate society is the new age attack on our Reserved Rights. There is so much poverty simply because courts throughout America do not interpret laws free of personal bias. Many of those remanding legal decisions pertaining to our Reserved/Inherent Treaty Rights have never met an Native! So they act upon what is published or presented by the media as gospel. As long as Native Americans refuse to respond accordingly to these ignorant attacks or prostilization of who we are today the public ignorance will remain and only grow!

I have been to the Wind River Reservation. Is there a nice part somewhere that us "white" people just can't find. Even the casino is riddled with drugs and prostitution. I have also been to a number of other reservations in Montana and South Dakota. I see the same thing there and somehow this is the white mans fault? Maybe the reservations are a flawed idea and our government needs to stop giving these people a free ride so they can abuse drugs and alcohol. When I see drunken indians passed out in the city parks of Riverton after drinking themselves to unconsciousness I don't blame myself. I blame them and I tell the sheriff that is at the gas station across the street, pretending he doesn't see it. Every reservation in America is living powerpoint presentation for how life should not be lived.